Blurred Lines
by Selonianth
Summary: There are strict lines between that which is synthetic, and that which is organic. Sometimes... those lines get blurred. A pondering on how indepth the cybernetics Shepard holds really are.


Disclaimer: Don't own Mass Effect, because Fuck You Bioware.

Janet Shepard looked into the mirror, her mind replaying that scene from the last day's battle, she'd been fighting her way through a small army of husks to find the artifact that had been creating them and in an attempt to knock one aside she'd almost ripped it's head off with the blow. She'd shrugged it off at the time but now... She looked down at her hands. She wasn't the same as she had been before. Her mind was, that she knew, but her body? Something was different.

Walking to the elevator she pressed the button for Engineering, thankful that she'd picked up Tali as soon as her position had been confirmed. Exiting the elevator she quickly entered the Engine Room and grabbed the quarian's shoulder. "Tali, follow me."

Tali had heard Shepard's no nonsense voice enough, especially in battle, to know that the beautiful human needed her to listen with no questions asked. The two were back in the elevator and heading up to the Crew Deck a moment later, Tali still not daring to ask why Shepard had dragged her out of engineering.

Shepard walked unerringly to Miranda's office and entered, after Tali was in and the door closed Shepard looked at Tali for the first time since grabbing her out of Engineering. "Seal that door."

"Shepard what-" Miranda Lawson started to protest.

Shepard cut her off with a raised hand. Only after the Cerberus Operative closed her mouth did Janet Shepard speak, "What did you do to me?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, I haven't done anything to you."

Shepard reached into one of the seemingly bottomless pockets on her pants and pulled a sidearm to lay on her lap after she sat down. As it expanded to it's firing state Shepard looked into Miranda's eyes. "What did you do to me in Project Lazarus. I'm not the way I was before. I was stronger than natural, faster, and slightly smarter because of the genetic therapy the Alliance gave me but this goes past that, so I'll ask one more time. What did you do to me?"

"You wouldn't get away with-" Miranda started again.

Shepard interrupted again, sick of playing games when all she wanted were answers. "Tali just sealed that door, and trust me when I say that if a quarian wants something to stay locked it will stay locked. No one will interrupt our talk, and no one will object once we're done because if you answer my question you will be just fine when I walk out of here and Jacob is the only other combat certified operative on this ship that is loyal to you and not me. I don't have to remind you how many times I destroyed cerberus operations with less manpower than I have on this boat. You could try to fight me yourself, sure, but do you really think you could hit me hard enough with Biotics for me to not get a shot off? Or to stop Tali from unleashing Chiktikka?"

Miranda's mind raced, trying to find a way out before she slumped. "No. I couldn't. Fine. I'll tell you. The Illusive Man wanted me to avoid telling you all we had to do to bring you back, because it wasn't easy."

Shepard nodded relaxing and placing the gun on the windowsill to her left. "Go on," she offered in lieu of asking the question again.

Miranda stood up, facing away for a moment before she turned back wringing her hands. "First thing you should understand is your body was tore up when it made it to my hands. The zero-pressure environment you were in caused your lungs to more or less explode, and that wasn't the half of it. half your internal organs were almost ruined. There was talk of just building you a robotic body and placing your mind in it but the Illusive Man decided that with your history with the geth building you a robotic body would not be the way to go so we had to try and salvage the one you already had."

Now Miranda paced as she talked. "First thing we had to do was replace your destroyed lungs. Your body rejected the first three attempts to clone you new lungs so we were forced to install a pair of robotic lungs, they work more or less the same... except they will ignore any gas or particle other than oxygen that enters them. Any smoke that is inhaled will simply be exhaled on the outbreath, poisons likewise. Your heart was in remarkably good shape, for what it had gone through, so we were able to resurrect it; admittedly we did have to do extensive repair. Your veins were ruined, but not beyond help, because of their widespread nature they were not so easy to repair through traditional means, we were forced to inject a large amount of medical-nanobots into your system. This had a side effect of both immunizing you against any injected poison as well as introducing a healing factor to your body. You'll never heal as fast as a Krogan but you will heal dramatically faster than any other human."

Shepard looked down and flexed her hand, remembering when it had been hit by a round just as her shields went down, she'd applied medigel but by the time she made it back to the medbay to have Chakwas take a look at it, the injury had been gone. She'd been forced to pass it off as wanting to give the good doctor the bottle of Serrice Ice Brandy she'd bought the week before when they were on Omega.

"Most of your bones were shattered into too many pieces to reform so they have been replaced with a material of similar weight but over six times the strength. Even if something does manage to break them, the nanobots in your blood are capable of repairing them and at much greater speed than a natural broken bone. The cartilage in your joints was replaced with a gel-like material that won't be worn down by your constant activity for roughly five hundred years, at which point it can be easily replaced. Your musculature was, sadly, utterly destroyed by the hundreds of blood vessels popping inside it. As such it was replaced with newly grown muscle."

"But I'm stronger than I used to be, a lot stronger. How can I be this strong if it's not some sort of synthetic tissue?" Shepard pressed.

Miranda shrugged, "The Illusive man said your mind had to be the same, he never said your physical characteristics had to be exactly the same so when we had to throw out your old musculature we took the chance to make you better, to give you a better shot at completing the mission you laid before your own feet. When the muscle was grown it was both genetically altered to be capable of damn near bench pressing an old twenty-first century car and compressed to fit on your frame with a minimum of alteration to the contours you were used to. It was a challenge the team assigned to your muscle groups took to heart and, I'd say they succeeded, wouldn't you?"

"Well, I don't know how heavy a car was, but I almost knocked a husk's head clean off it's shoulders when I punched it," Shepard offered, remembering the shock when the husk had, instead of stumbling as she'd expected, gave a gargle as it fell to the ground.

Miranda nodded, "As far as the rest of your major organs are concerned most of them were simply replaced with newly grown organs, except for a couple. Your body would not accept a newly grown liver or kidneys, both had to be replaced by cybernetics entirely. You can get drunk, but it won't be easy and it will fade quickly and you'll never have to worry about something that does make it into your blood that your kidneys can't filter out. Lastly... your skin, it wasn't something we needed to change necessarily but someone decided to give you a layer under your dermis very similar to the Turian's top layer, you're moderately radiation-proof now."

"All of these things make it sound like you wanted to make sure I could survive anything... what has all this done to my lifespan?" Shepard asked, remembering how sad Liara had been one night when they'd laid together and Shepard had remarked how much it sucked that she would only have a hundred years of life with Liara. The blue skinned beauty had quieted down instantly and clung to Shepard even harder, as if afraid to lose her. It would be quite a gift if it turned out she would be with the asari scientist that much longer.

Miranda took a moment to think of how to phrase it to the Spectre Commander, "I can't say for sure, but I can tell you that you will likely outlive every human alive right now. Whether you live four hundred years or a thousand, I don't know. I just know that if you don't die in a blaze of glory, you will definitely outlive everyone on this ship, except maybe Samara."

Shepard sat there, slightly stunned. She would easily outlive every human she'd ever known assuming she survived the reapers, and she had no intention of dying. "Thank you for telling me. I'd appreciate if you didn't tell the Illusive Man that you told me. Tali, unlock the door, we don't need to worry about being interrupted any longer."

"I won't Shepard. You helped me save Oriana, it's the least I could do," Miranda promised.

Shepard smiled back and headed out of the room. The knowledge that she was more or less a cyborg needed to be thought about... somewhere she wouldn't be interrupted. To Jack's corner it was then.

A/N: This is pre-endgame. Otherwise Miranda telling the Illusive-Man wouldn't even be a mentionable issue, and there would have been a much shorter convincing of Miranda to spill in the first place.


End file.
